How to automate common tasks
Automating common tasks is crucial to effective data analysis. Automation saves you lots of time from repeating the same sets of operations, and it reduces errors by reducing what you have to repeat.
Let’s automate something using Stata. The task we are automating doesn’t much matter. What matters is that we get comfortable with how to automate tasks.
We will automate the simple task of normalizing a variable. That is to say, subtracting the variable’s mean and dividing by its standard deviation.
Just so you know, there are already community-contributed commands to do this and to do it more flexibly than we will. Type search normalize variable in Stata, and you will see one of those commands. (You will see things about other types of normalization that have nothing to do with normalizing a variable, but the command of interest is easy to pick out.) You can also normalize a single variable using Stata’s egen command, but we are going to do more than that.
As with all the articles in this series, I assume the reader is new to automating tasks in Stata. So, if you are already an expert, these articles may hold little interest for you. Or perhaps you will still find something novel. Read more…